The
Irascible ProfessorSM

Irreverent
Commentary on the State of Education in America Today

by
Dr. Mark H. Shapiro

"If
you come to my office and ask me a loaded question like 'Dr. Hansen
why did you give me an F on the paper?' ....I'll have to answer
'because I couldn't grade you any lower.'"...
...Dr. Earl Hansen.

Commentary of the Day - May 17, 2010: To Grade or Not to Grade: That Is the Assessment.
Guest commentary by Carolyn Foster Segal.

Topping The Chronicle of Higher Education’s
list of most "e-mailed" articles for several weeks
this spring was a piece on outsourcing grading
(Audrey Williams June, "Some
Papers Are Uploaded to Bangalore to Be Graded").
In the print edition of the Chronicle, where
it first appeared, it ran on the front page, above
the fold -- as it should have, for this was very big
news. Here at last was the key to happiness:
one company
and one professor coming together to live the life
that other instructors have only dreamed of:
teaching without the grading.
Can it be true? Will the ultimate outcome
of the age of assessment be freedom from grading?

The possibilities inherent in this radical step are
staggering: for starters, think of how much more
time faculty members will have for committee work
and the creation of new documents on the state of
education.

My own fantasy, which began shortly (two weeks --
which coincided with the collection of the first of
seven writing assignments from my 56 students) after
I became a graduate teaching fellow, was far more
amateurish. I envisioned a theme-grading machine
that resembled my toaster oven. I would simply
place the paper on the browning tray, close up the
oven door, and set the dial not to "toast" or "bake"
but to "follow rubric." A timer would ring
when the paper was ready.

But alas, even while I indulged in this fantasy for
years, I would always come back to the sobering
realization that I would still have to read the
papers.

I would still have to read each paper because I
needed to know what my students were thinking (or
not thinking). Grading papers --reading those
students essays and commenting on them -- is where a
great deal of teaching goes on. The biggest
part of that lesson has less to do with any
particular text than it has to do with encouraging
students to see that writing is a way -- a powerful
way -- of understanding.

This is not to say that I always approach this
monumental task cheerfully. Over the years, I
have developed a set of rituals that precede the
task of grading: these include sharpening pencils;
assembling the texts that my students have written
about; weeding flowerbeds or, depending on the
season, shoveling snow; and, obsessively counting
the number of papers lying in piles on my dining
room table. And I am always mindful not only
of the fact that returning papers quickly is
essential, but of two comments by full professors at
the university where I worked as an adjunct in the
writing program for five years. The first
comment had to do with the fact that the longer one
teaches, the more difficult, not easier, grading
becomes. The second observation goes a long
way toward explaining the first one. When he
read a paper, the then-director of the writing
program told me, he read it in the context of every
paper that he had read before it.

He was right, of course. A new student essay
on Sylvia Plath is more effective than
Proust's cookie at conjuring up memories of
papers past -- analyses not only of Plath's work but
that of her double, Anne Sexton, along with essays
on confessional poetry in general, and, while I'm at
it, any literary critique of contemporary literature
submitted within the last twenty years. But
the point is that the paper I'm holding today (after
weeding the south flowerbed for the third time) is
in fact new -- and it deserves my full attention.
That paper shows me not only what my student can do,
but what we need to work on together.

The
Irascible Professor comments: Outsourcing grading
really is nothing new. Back in the day when
the IP was taking introductory courses in chemistry
and physics at U.C., Berkeley it always rankled him
that the grading of his exams was outsourced.
This was long before the age of the Internet; and,
the professors teaching these large lecture sections
outsourced the grading not to Bangalore but to
teaching assistants who were located conveniently
down the hall so to speak from the professors'
offices. The classes in question typically had
between 150 and 300 students in a given section, so
it was understandable that the professors teaching
these huge lecture sections needed help with the
grading. And, they did try to be fair about
the process. Typically, a four or five problem
exam would be assigned to four or five teaching
assistants for grading. One TA would grade all
responses to the first problem, another would grade
all responses to the second problem, etc. In
this way some consistency in grading was achieved.
But the process still had the key shortcoming that
still gives Carolyn Segal misgivings. Namely,
the professor never got to see the students' work.

The
mathematics department at Berkeley at the time took
a different tack towards introductory courses.
These courses typically were taught in a small
section format entirely by teaching assistants who
worked under the supervision of a faculty member.
The TA graded the homework, the midterm exams, and
the common final exam that was given to all the
sections meeting at a given time. The drawback
of this system was the uneven nature of the
teaching. Some TA's were excellent teachers,
others were not so good, and a few were really bad.
But surprisingly, the IP found that on average the
TAs weren't that bad as teachers. Unlike the
regular faculty members who had little time for
students in freshman and sophomore classes, the TAs
generally made themselves much more available.
And most importantly they had some feeling for a
student's strengths and weaknesses, because they had
graded the student's homework and exams themselves.

The IP
was fortunate to have taught in a university where
large introductory sections were a rarity.
This gave him the opportunity to personally grade
each student's exams. The process could be a
challenge at times, just as Carolyn has noted, but
the results were worth the effort for exactly the
same reason. We found out what we needed to
work on together.